The Delaware Supreme Court’s decision in Sunder Energy, LLV v. Jackson, No. 455, 2023, 2024 Del. LEXIS 407 (December 10, 2024) reaffirmed the courts’ limited willingness to modify or “blue-pencil” overbroad restrictive...more
In a recent en banc decision, Delaware’s Supreme Court upheld a key tool available to employers to enforce forfeiture-for-competition provisions against former employees. Delaware’s Chancery Court has shown an increasing...more
The Delaware Supreme Court’s ruling in Cantor Fitzgerald v. Ainslie, which reversed the Court of Chancery’s 2023 finding that forfeiture-for-competition provisions should be evaluated by the same “reasonableness” standard as...more
The Delaware Supreme Court recently clarified that forfeiture-for-competition clauses under the Employee Choice Doctrine may be enforceable against a broader range of employees, including middle managers, not just...more
In line with the national trend making noncompetes more difficult to enforce, a number of Delaware courts have recently refused to “blue pencil” overbroad noncompetition agreements and have stricken them in their entirety. As...more
Arizona employer cannot exclude settlement communications from former employee’s retaliation complaint - In Flores v. Rafi Law Group PLLC, the plaintiff accused her law firm employer of retaliating against her by (i)...more
As previously reported, some Delaware courts have recently declined to “blue pencil,” i.e., modify and narrow overbroad restrictive covenants. Instead, they have stricken in their entirety covenants deemed overbroad and...more
In this issue of Employment Flash: the new DOL rule on independent contractors, SCOTUS’s unanimous Sarbanes-Oxley whistleblower ruling, plus labor law developments in California, Delaware, D.C., New York, the EU, Germany and...more
Less than two months after the Delaware Supreme Court provided the employers, investment partners and other business leaders that trust in the stability of Delaware law to protect their critical business interests with the...more
A recent decision of the Delaware Supreme Court is worth noting considering how many corporations choose Delaware for their choice-of-law provision in contracts. This pro-employer decision is a welcome change to corporations...more
In Cantor Fitzgerald, L.P. v. Ainslie, No. 162, 2023, 2024 WL 315193 (Del. Jan. 29, 2024), the Delaware Supreme Court held enforceable a “forfeiture for competition” provision in a limited partnership agreement, upholding...more
The Delaware Court of Chancery has been increasingly willing of late to strike down non-compete covenants as overbroad, a trend accompanied by a growing unwillingness to “blue pencil” agreements by narrowing terms to what the...more
Last week, the Delaware Supreme Court reversed a Chancery Court decision that we wrote about previously, which invalidated a forfeiture-for-competition provision as an unreasonable restraint of trade. The Ainslie et al. v....more
Delaware has long been favored by businesses for many reasons, including its courts’ deference to parties’ ability to contract. Recently, however, the Delaware Chancery Court was seemingly less deferential to restrictive...more
Stemming a tide of Delaware decisions closely scrutinizing and refusing to enforce non-compete agreements, Delaware’s Supreme Court held that forfeiture-for-competition provisions arising out of a Delaware limited partnership...more
In a win for businesses that rely on restrictive covenants to protect their assets and investments, on January 29, 2024, the Delaware Supreme Court unanimously reversed a Chancery Court decision that invalidated a...more
Over the past six months, the Delaware Court of Chancery has issued a series of decisions narrowing the scope of permissible non-compete agreements, while declining to “blue pencil” those provisions to render them...more
In 2021, the Delaware Court of Chancery issued two decisions addressing when a contractual party’s affiliates are bound to restrictive covenants in an agreement. In the first case, Sixth Street Partners Management Company,...more